Exploring the Dynamics of Profitability–Liquidity Relations in Crisis, Pre-Crisis and Post-Crisis

The aim of this study is to verify the stability of the profitability–liquidity relationship over time, as well as to determine this relationship in terms of its level and structure. In this context, three main research questions were formulated. First, is the profitability–liquidity relationship stable in times of crisis? Second, what is the profitability of companies with high and low liquidity? Third, what is the liquidity of companies with high and low profitability? This study uses a self-organizing map (SOM), a data visualization technique that is a type of artificial neural network trained in an unsupervised manner. A dataset covering the period from 2019 to 2021, consisting of 300 Polish companies from the wholesale and retail sectors, was used. The main results of this study indicate that: (1) companies with a balanced profitability–liquidity relationship in the pre-crisis period (2019) maintained this relationship in the crisis (2020) and post-crisis periods (2021); (2) companies in the clusters with the relatively highest and lowest profitability have the relatively lowest and moderate liquidity both before and after the crisis period; (3) the majority of companies during non-crisis periods demonstrate that profitability is not reliant on liquidity, suggesting an absence of a clear relationship; (4) in the post-crisis period, companies with the relatively lowest operating cash flow margin (OCFM) exhibited the relatively highest net profit margin (NPM) and other profitability ratios, as opposed to the pre-crisis and crisis periods. This study fills the gap resulting from the incomplete—most of all static—understanding of the relationship between profitability and liquidity. Moreover, this study employs a self-organizing map (SOM) which has not been used in the literature regarding the research area undertaken.